Ain’t I a Person: A film about being poor in America – 04/26/11 – Drexel Theater – Columbus, OH

During the past quarter century, a myth has developed that poor people are lazy and that providing them with government assistance leads to dependency and a lack of personal responsibility. The reality is very different. The poverty rate dropped sharply in response to the War on Poverty programs, only to level off in the late 1970s when those programs started getting cut back, and increasing through the Reagan-Bush era attacks on social welfare. The slight drop in the late-1990s has already disappeared, and the poverty rate has skyrocketed during the so-called Great Recession. The plight of the poor has just gotten worse. While the accepted wisdom now is that public interventions do not work, that is a myth: the reality is that they have and still could.
Co-sponsored by the Drexel Theater, The Free Press and the Central Ohio Green Education Fund.